People's Army of Vietnam.

• Author: Broyles, William, Jr.

People's Army of Vietnam.

Douglas Pike. Presido, $22.50. It is the enduring question of the Vietnam war: How did a poor, undeveloped nation of peasants manage to defeat the state-of-the-art armed forces of the most powerful country in the world?

With the same political solipsism that got us into Vietnam in the first place, we Americans have sought the answer in our own mistakes and failures, from which we attempt to draw "lessons' so that we avoid such embarrassment again.

Now comes Douglas Pike to remind us that wars are not only lost, they are won. And the Vietnam war was won by an extraordinary creation, the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN). Pike lists its achievements in what one hopes he considers a descending order of importance: "It frustrated three of the most powerful nations on earth, confused the world press, and confounded academia.'

At the core of the communist army's victory was "a messianic leadership of extraordinary insight acting as a catalyst on a singular, centuries-old, martial spirit.' According to Pike, Ho Chi Minh and his military aide, Vo Nguyen Giap, created their army in 1944 with 34 men and women and "the theoretical base for a new kind of warfare conducted by a new kind of revolutionary force.'

There were two key concepts: that of the dau tranh, or struggle; and that of the thoi co, or opportune moment. Dau tranh meant a total commitment to a single, transcendent end--the liberation and unification of Vietnam; thoi co meant that the end would be gained by whatever means were appropriate at a given moment.

World War II had brought civilians into warfare. Ho and Giap abolished the idea of a civilian entirely. In their dau tranh everyone would fight: men, women, children, with sticks, slogans, knives, propaganda, whatever worked. The army itself, their movement's most valuable possession, would be engaged sparingly, and only when it would almost surely win.

In their vision of protracted war, there was no such thing as defeat; there was only setback. The thoi co would come again; perhaps next time another tactic would work. Pike calls it a "50-year strategy.' It meant that for the Americans in Vietnam to lose militarily was to lose the war, but to win militarily was not to win it. Against the Vietnamese strategy, Pike writes, "there is no proven counterstrategy.'

Having spent considerable time in Vietnam recently, I find myself wondering not how the communists won the war, but how they fought at all. A more backward...